A Primer on Haunting
Last week, we got to know Alienated Young Woman through some of my favorite books. This week, we’re kicking off the inaugural Recommendation Guide with my favorite literary genre—the Gothic.
Once upon a time, as the age of BookTok dawned, I embarked on an Icarian mission to share my tastes with my own nine followers, starting with an entry guide into the world of Gothic fiction. And though both comments on my video were positive, I’ll spare you my first callow attempt (read: it was bad and I want to seem cooler than that). Still, as I was considering how to kick off my Recommendation Guide series, it seemed like the best—and ripest—way to continue introducing myself. Most of my guides probably won’t be this lengthy, but as you’ll see, I have a lot to say about the Gothic and a lot of favorites to share, so strap in!
But first, let’s talk about it: Plenty of critics have argued that the Gothic is a rigid literary genre, one where ghosts and ghouls—or at least the threat of the supernatural—go bump in the night. Or, you might be thinking of the Gothic the way critic Emma Mai Ewing once playfully summed it up, as “a story told by the heroine, often working as a governess or companion in a brooding castle or mansion…. alternately attracted and repelled by the rakishly handsome man who plays the villain until almost the last page—and who then comes to her rescue.” And while the Gothic absolutely has its tropes, a definition that’s really stuck with me comes from Tom J. Hillard’s essay "Deep Into That Darkness Peering," where he proposes that the Gothic is not necessarily one genre, but a literary tool that can be utilized for any genre as a way of exploring “cultural contradictions.”
I’m a big-time fan of horror in movies and literature, but what I love about the Gothic is that it truly can be anything. In its more than 250 years of existence as a viable genre, authors have used the scaffolding of the Gothic to explore any number of ideas surrounding social taboo, repression, history, guilt, change, and memory. What’s allowed the Gothic to stay relevant even centuries after its inception isn’t just the iconic monsters, twisted romances, and haunted houses that made it famous as a genre, but how strongly it’s held up as a mode of societal critique and reckoning with historical memory.
With that in mind, this guide will approach the Gothic as both a genre and a literary tool, and under its loosest definition: a general aesthetic of haunting. We’ll talk about the reinvention of the Gothic in the 19th century, the reimagined Gothic of the 20th, and whether we’ve yet approached our own renaissance in the 21st. I’ll recommend some more straightforward horror classics, some that I think perfectly encapsulate the Gothic setting, and others that reimagine what a haunting can mean. I have complicated thoughts on how we market the contemporary Gothic, but I’ll do my best to recommend a few favorites from the 2020s as well. Finally, I’ll also share what’s next up on my Gothic reading list.
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19th Century: The Monster
Granted, the 19th century is not actually the genesis of the Gothic novel. Instead, we’re starting off our list from a point of reinvention: the creation of the Gothic monster. Sure, the original Gothic novel may have been developed during the previous century through romances like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)—books where Ewing’s mysterious castles and brooding villains abound—but it was remade in the image of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. With Frankenstein, Shelley revolutionized and revived a genre that had become almost formulaic. (So formulaic, in fact, that Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written about 15 years earlier, was quite literally a parody of the all-too-predictable 18th-century Gothic as English authors attempted to mimic Radcliffe’s success). It’s in Frankenstein’s wake that we see the beginning of a new paradigm for horror, one that incorporates older Gothic themes like haunted manors, ghostly apparitions, and fiendish murderers with something new: a tangible, definitively nonhuman monster. You’ll find as we get further into this list that Shelley’s innovations not only hold up two centuries later, but in terms of originality and influence, they have yet to be matched.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
In 1816, an 18-year-old Mary Shelley was visiting Switzerland with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and friends Lord Byron, Jane Clairmont, and John William Polidori. As the story goes, to entertain themselves on a rainy day, Byron suggested a friendly competition—each writer would try their hand at writing the best horror story. Suffice it to say, Shelley won. What resulted was Frankenstein, the story of an arrogant young scientist who strives to create life from the dead and, to his horror, eventually succeeds. But when he resolves to abandon his creation, he finds regret—like haunting—is no easy thing to escape. Thanks to Frankenstein’s double framing device (the Creature tells his story to Victor Frankenstein, who tells his own story to the narrator), we experience from all perspectives the resurrection, eventual abandonment, and the monsters it creates. In this genre-defining novel, Shelley tells a horror story that questions the limits of man-made creation, what happens when those limits are tested, and who the real monster is after all.
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
Carmilla may not be the first vampire in literature (that honor belongs to Polidori’s 1819 short story “The Vampyre,” a product of that same friendly competition that produced Frankenstein), but it’s where we see the literary vampire truly take shape. Set in a remote castle in the forests of Austria, the novel follows Laura, a lonely teenager living in relative isolation with her widowed father when a mysterious noblewoman appears at their doorstep. In Carmilla, we see Le Fanu refine what would become a defining characteristic of the vampire genre by exploring vampirism as an extension of sexual taboo; the danger to Laura is a blood-sucking demon, yes, but it’s also sex, transgression, and most of all, the part-visible phantom of queer desire.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
There’s no alien figure haunting The Picture of Dorian Gray the way we see in Frankenstein or Carmilla—the book’s protagonist is monstrous enough on his own. Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel is a characteristic skewering of Victorian culture, and one that uses the Gothic’s creepiest hallmarks to explore long-suppressed questions about queerness, class, and greed. And, like Shelley before him, Wilde is distinctly interested in what transforms man into monster. In high society London, a vain young man makes a wish that his portrait should age while he remains young and beautiful forever. For the next two decades, he enjoys a life of hedonism and harm, letting the portrait bear his punishment, but when the past starts to catch up to him, he learns the true price of selling his soul. In a book once quite literally deemed too scandalous for Victorian readers, Wilde questions the function of social taboo and what it truly means to live a moral life, and creates one of the Gothic’s most chilling monsters in the process.
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
Last week, I posed the question, “Who is Count Dracula if not an Alienated Young Woman?” But as foundational as I think he is to the Hannah Horvath canon, he’s perhaps better known as a prototypical Gothic monster. In Dracula, a young solicitor arrives at a remote castle in Transylvania, only to learn his host isn’t quite who—or what—he seems. Over the next several months, we move through a growing cast of characters as each comes to understand more about the nature of the mysterious figure who’s followed them home. And if it’s possible that any element of Dracula is under-discussed, it’s this ensemble and the way we get to know them through Stoker’s approach to form. Dracula is written as an epistolary novel, which itself was not uncommon for the period, but this one has no real protagonist. Instead, through letters, journal entries, and even, at one point, through captain’s logs, we get to see the monster through everyone’s eyes but his own—which only makes the story all the more haunting.
Honorable Mentions: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1848)
While these two novels don’t necessarily fit into the aforementioned classic monster category of 19th-century Gothic, they’re no less foundational. In Jane Eyre, an isolated, abused young orphan girl navigates the rigid hierarchies of Victorian society, and after a series of tragedies, accepts a governess position at the mysterious Thornfield manor, but after falling in love with her employer, the dark and brooding Mr. Rochester, she finds everything at Thornfield is not what it seems. In Wuthering Heights, a different isolated, abused orphan grows into a hardened, enigmatic man and seeks revenge on all who wronged him as a child, but finds no amount of cruelty will help him escape the haunting presence of his lost childhood love. Here, not only do the two authors contribute two of the most unsettling entries in the canon of 19th-century romance, but they refine the Gothic atmosphere into something we still see traces of in contemporary work. They also bring to life another genre-defining Gothic trope—all-consuming, social-order-perverting obsession. And while the presence of vampires, curses, and other supernatural entities may be limited in these two novels, they contain no shortage of monstrosity.
Another Honorable Mention: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (published 1817, originally completed in 1803)
Austen’s satire of the genre fittingly follows Catherine Morland, a young woman so obsessed with the Gothic novel that she becomes convinced she’s actually living in one. Admittedly, this is not my favorite of Austen’s novels—it’s more rambling than Emma or Pride and Prejudice and not nearly as witty, but for fans of her work or of the 19th-century Gothic as a whole, it’s a fun addition.
20th Century: The Ghost
In the 20th century, albeit on a smaller scale, we see the Gothic enter another period of reinvention. For one, the genre continued its migration—the American wing of Gothic literature, which had its roots in 19th-century authors like Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe, fully solidified in this period and became something altogether distinct from the literature coming out of Europe. If 19th-century Gothic had couched in its castles and monsters a critique of society as it was—exploring issues of hierarchy, taboo, and repression—the 20th-century American Gothic took up the task of reckoning with the ghosts that previous society had left behind.
By the middle of the century, this version of the Gothic had come into its own. Authors like Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor were reimagining classic tropes in the context of everyday American life (and exploring what “everyday American life” meant in the first place). Meanwhile, authors like Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison were using the Gothic as a framework for more explicitly reexamining race, patriarchy, and colonialism—those other relics of 19th-century Europe—as their own sorts of inescapable ghosts.
As the American Gothic takes shape in the mid-20th century, we also see the Southern Gothic truly come into its own as perhaps the original genre’s most important offshoot. Defined not just by its geography and emphasis on regional culture in the southern United States, the Southern Gothic is also distinctly interested in the grotesque. Physically, mentally, or morally distorted characters exist in dilapidated settings, burdened by the specter of real-life issues plaguing the post-Civil War South, from generational poverty, to illness, to bigotry and violence. While there’s an entirely separate article to be written on the Southern Gothic (and many have been), I’ll include a few recommendations throughout this guide if you’re interested in exploring this thread further.
The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1958-1962)
If one author was seminal in shaping the 20th-century American Gothic, it was Shirley Jackson, whose take on the Gothic is perhaps the closest we come to an innovation like Shelley’s a century and a half earlier. Fitting for this era, Jackson’s novels rework classic Gothic settings to fit the domestic lives of young women in post-WWII America, grappling with questions of shifting gender dynamics, mental illness, and class divides with creeping prose that makes her deceptively mundane New England settings feel as haunted as Count Dracula’s castle. But really, what makes Jackson’s work so influential is her signature maneuver: her ghost stories make you question if there were ever ghosts in the first place. I recommended two of Jackson’s books in my last post, but The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are some of my favorite haunted literature out there, and some of the most important. In The Haunting of Hill House, the sheltered and guilt-ridden Eleanor joins three eccentric strangers in the eerie Hill House as part of a study attempting to find evidence of haunting. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, two sisters in small-town New England live as social pariahs in the dilapidated mansion where their parents died mysteriously ten years earlier. Eerie, mesmerizing, and undoubtedly haunting, Jackson’s two masterworks are must-reads for anyone interested in understanding the Gothic.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
This one feels a little awkward since I admittedly sidelined Jane Eyre, which serves as its source material, but alas. We endure. In true 20th-century fashion, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea quite literally creates a new framework for rethinking a Gothic classic. Rather than Jane and Mr. Rochester, Rhys turns our attention toward the madwoman in the attic herself, Rochester’s first wife, Bertha. But rather than a story about the making of a monster a la Dorian Gray, Rhys instead reapproaches the story from a more Shelley-esque lens that questions how we decide who is a monster in the first place. Bertha is reimagined as Antoinette, a Creole heiress living on a plantation in Jamaica until her arranged marriage to Rochester, when assimilation, alienation, and exploitation force her further and further into isolation. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys masters the creeping anxiety of the original Gothic to tell the story of the horrors her predecessors often overlooked—colonialism, patriarchy, and the ghosts left in their wake.
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
Like I said, we couldn’t discuss the 20th-century Gothic without at least touching on the Southern Gothic, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the pinnacle. Though set largely on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Beloved is a quintessentially Southern story, and one that incorporates and refines some of the genre’s hallmarks, from remote small-town settings to physical and mental illness, to grotesque circumstances, to social ills. The novel follows the residents of the haunted 124 Bluestone Road—the formerly-enslaved Sethe, her teenage daughter Denver, and her lover, Paul D—as they reckon with a malevolent spirit in their home, and with the memories of their lives before the spirit. Eventually, I’ll start to sound redundant if I call every one of Morrison’s books “one of the most important books in American literature,” (even if that’s absolutely true) so I’ll leave you with this: beyond mastering the Southern Gothic themes and aesthetic, Beloved does exactly what the 20th-century Gothic novel set out to do—it expands the bounds of what the Gothic can be.
Honorable Mention: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
Yes, this is the third Rebecca mention on this blog with only two posts, so I’ll keep it (sort of) brief. Truthfully, I struggled a bit with whether to include this book at all, if only because it’s so unlike the rest of this section. While the 20th century was certainly a period of reimagining the Gothic to explore new themes, with Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier created a foundational 19th-century Gothic classic, 40 years later. Rebecca is decidedly not a supernatural monster novel or a ghost story, except that it’s entirely a story about monsters and ghosts. Instead, du Maurier evokes elements of 19th-century cornerstones—even pulling plot inspiration from Jane Eyre—to tell a story where horror comes in the form of repression and guilt, and is no less dangerous than a blood-sucking demon lurking on your windowsill.
21st Century: The Memory
As I mentioned, this is where things start to get sticky. While I’ve enjoyed some mainstream hits well enough, like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, I’ve also started to worry that what’s marketed as “contemporary Gothic” is more focused on creating a Frankenstein’s monster of regurgitated settings and tropes instead of actually building a more expansive approach to what the Gothic can do. If trends are always cyclical, then we’re approaching the same one that Austen satirized two hundred years ago with Northanger Abbey: things are getting formulaic.
But since I don’t want to be entirely fatalistic, I’ve tried to make this list a collection of recent books that have evoked the Gothic for me in some larger thematic way—be it Jackson’s imaginary ghosts, the Brontës’ obsession-as-haunting, or Shelley and Morrison’s haunting-as-regret. Given the genre’s history of ambiguity and evolution, I also want to think expansively about novels that might be reimagining what, and who, the Gothic can be. And though my list is short, what’s piqued my interest lately are novels that reckon with memory as its own kind of haunting, so the books I’ve recommended here generally run with that idea in some direction.
That said, this is by no means a complete list; I’ve left off some arguable entries if I’ve already written about them elsewhere (including Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio and Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating), and I’m always on the hunt for more.
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (2020)
Mosfegh’s least-discussed novel is not horror, but it’s definitely a ghost story. Vesta, the book’s 72-year-old protagonist, is haunted by memories, and eventually by her own imagination, as she becomes obsessed with uncovering an apparent murder mystery in her isolated small town. Perhaps less visceral (or at least less gory) than the work that has come to define Moshfegh’s style, Death in Her Hands meditates—on regret, on possibility, and, naturally, on death—until Vesta herself is one of Moshfegh’s ghosts.
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (2021)
While many of our 20th-century entries reckoned with broader societal issues through the lens of ghosts, I’ve noticed several contemporary authors using a similar maneuver to explore more personal memories. With that in mind, poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s debut novel-in-verse, though not immediately recognizable as “Gothic” in setting or prose, is perhaps the most haunted novel on this list. Cultural memory—and literal ghosts—follow Melissa, the novel’s protagonist, as she resurrects a ghostly Selena Quintanilla in a desperate bid to find herself, only to find more than she bargained for in raising the dead. As tortured and isolated as Hill House’s Eleanor, as ambitious and short-sighted as Frankenstein’s titular doctor, and even, at times, as menacing as Rebecca’s Maxim de Winter, in Melissa, Lozada-Oliva creates a sublime, quintessentially Gothic guide through her reimagined ghost story, one as much about memory and forgiveness as it is about the supernatural. In many ways, this novel is a prime example of what I meant when we discussed using the Gothic not as a genre, but as a tool; the ghosts in Dreaming of You interrogate ideas about celebrity, identity, and artistry even more so than they haunt.
Mrs. S by K Patrick (2023)
Like Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland, The Girls—as the chorus is called in Mrs. S—want desperately to be haunted. And their desire is understandable; Patrick’s debut novel is set in archetypal Gothic conditions, a centuries-old Catholic girls’ boarding school in a remote corner of England. But that’s not all the author pulls from their 19th-century predecessors: Mrs. S is also a tale, like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and so many others before it, of obsession. In it, a young, butch Australian accepts a job at an elite English girls’ school where tradition is everything, only to find themself entangled and obsessed with the school’s counselor, who is also the headmaster’s wife. Modernity allows Patrick a more explicit version of the queerness that lurks beneath Carmilla, though the stigma of sexual taboo haunts the unnamed narrator of Mrs. S as much as Le Fanu’s Laura or Charlotte Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw. While plenty of contemporary authors have attempted to recreate the conditions that first made the Gothic so appealing, Patrick may be one of few who has truly mastered the genre’s underpinnings in a way that allows their story to retain its vibrant originality.
Rouge by Mona Awad (2023)
I told you I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend more by Mona Awad! Now to be fair, Rouge might fall into the aforementioned category of books marketed to the mainstream as Gothic (just check any of the myriad blurbs that describe it as a “Gothic fairy tale”). That said, no one could possibly accuse it of being unoriginal. In Rouge, a clinically depressed, beauty-obsessed 38-year-old dress store clerk grieving her estranged mother finds herself on a haunted—and quite possibly supernatural—journey through the ghosts of her mother’s past, and her own. And yes, eerie castles, rocky cliffs, and chilling secrets abound, but in typical Awad fashion, even the most experienced fan of the Gothic likely won’t imagine what happens next. Memory may take the place of the monster in many contemporary Gothic novels, but Awad always has another creature up her sleeve.
Honorable Mention: Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow (2022)
While this novel is far from horror-tinted, it encapsulates a lot of what I find remarkable about the Southern Gothic, and maybe even comes closest to building on the genre’s legacy in the 2020s. Spanning seven decades, Memphis follows three generations of women in a Black Southern family sharing a majestic home in the titular city’s historically Black neighborhood of Douglass. As each generation attempts to reckon with the previous, we gradually learn the stories of disaster, evil, and survival that shaped this family, and the memories that continue to haunt them in a city equally as steeped in history.
Short Stories
Short stories can be a great introduction for anyone just getting curious about the Gothic, but they also play an especially important role in the genre’s history. In fact, many of these stories and authors, like Poe, James, Gilman, Polidori, and Machado, have been just as—if not more—influential in shaping our conceptions of the Gothic as the full-length novels on this list. While the Gothic can sometimes feel like it’s all about atmosphere, a well-crafted haunting can be just as chilling in 10 pages as in 400. With that in mind, I’ve tried to recommend a few from each of the aforementioned eras.
Short Story Collections
The Gold-Bug and Other Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (written 1838-1843)
Though we haven’t really discussed him on this list, Poe’s short stories were foundational in cementing the Gothic’s place in American literature. As the Brontë sisters were refining the Gothic in England, across the Atlantic, writers like Poe, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were experimenting with its tropes as lenses through which to grapple with all sorts of 19th-century American anxieties, like class and individualism. Unlike some other authors, I don’t think there’s a wrong introduction to Poe; even Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher miniseries (which, bear in mind, is loose in its adaptation) is an entertaining way to get to know some of the author’s best work. Dover Thrift Editions’ The Gold-Bug and Other Tales collection is excellently curated and worth reading in its entirety, but a few of my particular favorite stories include The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Black Cat.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (1949)
If you’re wondering why Shirley Jackson is the only author to make three appearances on this list, check the back cover of this collection’s 75th-anniversary edition—chances are your favorite author has sung her praises.1 This collection of 25 short stories, most written before Jackson’s venture into full-length novels, tracks the author as she comes into her own as a master of horror, refining her captivating eerie style and carefully paced narration. If you were thoroughly unsettled by “The Lottery,” get ready for so much more.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
I’ve previously recommended Machado’s special edition of Carmilla, in which the author contributes a short story introduction and footnotes to Le Fanu’s original text, but her original work is no less creepy or compelling. In “Real Women Have Bodies,” a shopgirl watches a plague spread across the country that causes its victims—all women—to slowly dematerialize. In the sublimely Gothic “The Resident,” a young, queer writer gradually descends into madness at an idyllic artists’ retreat. In this Shirley Jackson Award-winning debut collection, Machado proves why she’s one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Gothic.
Individual Stories
“The Vampyre” by John William Polidori (1819)
In 19th-century London, the naive but wealthy Aubrey meets the enigmatic Lord Ruthven at a party and quickly agrees to accompany him on a trip across Europe, but soon finds his companion may be harboring a dangerous secret. How could we start with anything else? This sometimes overlooked story is the birth of the vampire in literature, which on its own is enough reason to engage, but it also stands on its own as a perfectly creepy, dread-filled descent into the supernatural.
“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” by Henry James (1868)
Surprise! Another recent Mike Flanagan adaptation, from another foundational author in the American Gothic. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” two sisters in colonial Massachusetts compete for the love of the same man, but when one of them dies unexpectedly, the other learns supernatural entities aren’t the only thing haunting their family home. I’m admittedly less fond of James than Poe, which is why he doesn’t appear more extensively on this list, but this story is Gothic excellence.
“The Shadow of a Shade” by Tom Hood (1869)
A haunted portrait. A ship sent to recover the wreckage of the lost Franklin expedition. Showers of blood. For fans of Dorian Gray, AMC’s The Terror, or the novel that inspired the series, Tom Hood’s “The Shadow of a Shade,” which follows one British family as they experience a series of mysterious apparitions in the aftermath of an Arctic expedition, is a surefire hit.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
In this early predecessor to books like The Haunting of Hill House and Wide Sargasso Sea, a young mother suffering from postpartum depression is confined by her husband to a nursery, where she becomes convinced another woman may be lurking in the room’s patterned wallpaper. Terrifying and skewering, The Yellow Wallpaper hooks its readers with elements of a classic haunting before turning its eyes back to real life and asking which is scarier, the supernatural or the reality of domination.
“The Apple Tree” by Daphne du Maurier (1952)
In the English countryside, an embittered widower begins to suspect the ghost of his neglected wife is haunting an old apple tree. In typical du Maurier fashion, the haunting is only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re hesitant to commit to the full 400 pages of Rebecca, or you just want more of du Maurier’s take on Gothic settings, gender dynamics, and haunting, you’re barking up the right (apple) tree.
Next up on my reading list:
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860)
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (2022)
Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler (2005)
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (2023)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor (1988)
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas (2023)
Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird by Augustina Bazterrica (2023)
Depending on how I react to these novels, I may eventually update or publish a sequel to this guide. As always, comments are open, so suggest your favorites below!
Special thanks to Monica Feinberg Cohen, whose class Nineteenth Century Thrillers reignited my love for the Gothic novel, to Sahmaya and Lillian, for their expertise in all things Southern Gothic and Jane Eyre, and to Marvel’s Sebastian Stan, whose sad eyes captured my teenage heart and whose star turn in the terribly misguided 2018 film adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle sparked the beginning of my life-long love affair with the novels of Shirley Jackson.
That’s no hyperbole: Neil Gaiman, Donna Tartt, Ottessa Moshfegh, Joyce Carol Oates, Dorothy Parker, Carmen Maria Machado, and Stephen King are just a few of the writers whose blurbs are included.
Collage by the author.